Brave Debloating Guide

brave_debloat.md

Brave Debloating

This "guide" is going to tell you how to remove the useless bloat found in everyone's favorite browser, Brave.

Visual bloat

The vanilla config of the Brave browser is really messy and bloated. The start page has the Brave "cards" which are basically just ads and the search and the Brave news button at the bottom. Thankfully, you can hide them easily by clicking the customize button at the bottom right.

Now the URL- and top bar, there is the Brave rewards, -wallet, -VPN and the LeoAI buttons, which you can hide by right-clicking them and then clicking hide.

Actual bloat

Now if you want to completely disable the bloat such as the Brave wallet, -vpn and the LeoAI, you need to do some policy management.

Debloating and removing Tor for security purposes on Linux

Firstly create the folders: brave, policies and managed in the following path:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/brave/policies/managed/

Once you have created the following path, you can create the policy file in it and add your debloating policies:

sudo nano /etc/brave/policies/managed/bloat.json

Once you have created the file and are editing the file, add the following policies:

{
    "BraveRewardsDisabled": true,
    "BraveWalletDisabled": true,
    "BraveVPNDisabled": true,
    "BraveAIChatEnabled": false,
    "TorDisabled": true
}

Now that you have saved and created the file, Brave will apply the policies instantly. Now you have a clean and a minimal experience with the Brave browser.

Debloating and removing Tor for security purposes on Windows

Simply open Powershell as administrator and run these following commands:

# Ensure the Brave policy registry path exists
New-Item -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\BraveSoftware\Brave" -Force | Out-Null

# Disable Brave Rewards
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\BraveSoftware\Brave" -Name "BraveRewardsDisabled" -Type DWord -Value 1

# Disable Brave Wallet
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\BraveSoftware\Brave" -Name "BraveWalletDisabled" -Type DWord -Value 1

# Disable Brave VPN
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\BraveSoftware\Brave" -Name "BraveVPNDisabled" -Type DWord -Value 1

# Disable Brave AI Chat (Leo)
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\BraveSoftware\Brave" -Name "BraveAIChatEnabled" -Type DWord -Value 0

# Disable Tor
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\BraveSoftware\Brave" -Name "TorDisabled" -Type DWord -Value 1

And restart Brave for the policies to apply.